Evidence merchants should be immune to charm
 

I've seen a few complaints about players charming merchants, and a few responses to those complaints that nobody remembers merchants being charmed back in the day.

I have found a couple of pieces of evidence that support the argument that merchants should not be able to be charmed, certainly by Velious at the very least.

The first piece of evidence I found was in the official patch notes:



The above describes a bug that made all of Kael's NPCs uncharmable, it is noted merchants remain uncharmable after the fix. To me this implies merchants were not able to be charmed before this bug took place, and also generally across all of Norrath.

I have found collaborating evidence which suggest it is not exclusively the Kael merchants which are uncharmable, indeed it is a broader restriction:

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...05886580282145

Individually these comments might be too circumstantial ("perhaps it was only Kael merchants that could not be charmed" and "the post is a year or so outside our timeframe"), but put together these quotes strongly suggest merchants should not be charmable at some point in our timeline, if not throughout.

Good one. Didn't know they could charm merchants on P99.

Some more evidence from the newsgroups:

Thank god someone finally dug this up. Good work. OOT LEVELERS REJOICE.

The rejoicing would be drowned out by the Enchanter tears over Verina Tomb camp.

You posted something like that in 2017 already :
https://www.project1999.com/forums/s....php?p=2555344

I suspect this issue was zone specific, and not something that generally applied to vendors, just like corpse dragging giving aggro. Though it's possible they broadened the scope of this immunity, it would be hard to say if that happened in "our" classic timeline without good evidence.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the comment about Sro merchant either. At 35 his highest charm(beguile) can only charm up to level 37 mobs, so he's technically right it would be impossible for him to charm the level 40 dark elf merchants.

Can anyone find in-era (<2002) evidence of a merchant being charmed?

Thanks for the link. I remember posting a thread before, but I wasn't able to dig it up to deposit extra evidence. You're obviously a proficient researcher, perhaps you can help find proof either way that merchants were charmable or not?

You'd think there would be at least one reported incident of an enchanter having charmed a merchant somewhere if it were indeed classic.

If a p1999 enchanter could offer a list of popular merchants for charm I’ll try sift through the oldweb for classic comments suggesting to charm any merchants. I haven’t found any merchant’s pages on zam suggesting to attempt charm but I will continue attempting to find something conclusive one way or the other.

I have checked Gadalion, Isslana, Cazel (thought someone might comment to charm a merch here - nope... though I did find a comment or two echoing something I believed in classic - disease dots should block mob regen ), Synthan, Elesseryl Terussar, Doran Vargnus, Tisiana … None of them had an mention of merchant charming as a strategy. You'd think someone would have mentioned a merchant being a decent charm pet somewhere.

Like I said, if anyone can give a list of merchants that are obvious charm pets I'll sift through comments trying to find definitive evidence that merchants either could or could not be charmed.

I found the tag "Allowed Targets: All" on Allakhazam's wayback machine :
For Allure
And Cajoling Whispers

These datas extracted with EQCaster, which are "decyphered directly from the EverQuest directory itself" :
EQ Caster Faq

Does that mean you can charm merchants, idk, it just say "all".